Whollaborg: Duly Noted. Will be glad to have you on board if you join.
FAJ:
Q: What do you mean when you say all the independants are removed?
A: IndyPendant has proviced a custom .map file. You will still have to fight independants for control of provinces- but you will be unable to recruit any units or commanders there unless you a). build a fort there or b). find a magical site there. You'll pretty much have to rely on national troops and summons.
Q: What do you mean by a Halls of Valhalla spawn?
A: Simply put, whenever I organize a game, it always starts out first in this thread:
Halls of Valhalla
I do this for several reasons
1). It gives me a convenient place to put links explaining the llamaserver and links for me to find all the games I'm managing. 2). It gives me a place to organize, hammer out settings, ask questions, answer questions and all that. I've learned that once a game is declared open, its not a good time to tinker with maps and mods and such. People are impatient to get started, and if I take too long on modifying a map, we'll lose a few. So... in HoV, I declare a game open, accept a few players, but primarily plan out the settings and options and mods for a game, taking requests. Its kinda the slow pre-game phase. When its ready to go, I create a new thread that usually gets a lot of people joining much more quickly.
If there are a lot of games already open, I tend to allow more variation in the settings, mods and all that. These games tend to take a week or more to decide the settings, let alone start. This game, Forseti, took some time while I checked out mods and maps for compatibility, and indypendant made the noIndie modification.
If there are not many new games open, then I tend to go with the 'standard' settings outlined in the first post and get things started fast. In my 'standard' games, theres no mods to download or organize. I may tweak the rules a little, such as if everyone wants graphs ON, but nothing big.
Long enough?